bridget makes stuff | managed expectations

New Beginnings

I finished this website revision in April and I’m just now getting a firm sense of how this space functions as a hub for my things. I was using this blog area for announcements, work samples, old writing, and photo-journals — that is too many things for one chronological blog and there are much better platforms for all of those things. Pics are on VSCO, my work is in a Dribbble portfolio and on Instagram, and my old professional blogging is archived in a separate space. That leaves this blog for personal writing and reflection.

Here’s how the last few months shook out for me:

August:

I quit my job because the senior staff at my former organization had an absurdly disproportionate response to me giving them feedback they asked for; it became clear to me that their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion was purely superficial.

September:

I walked a lot of dogs and made a lot of art, my girlfriend quit HER job, we had some of the best weeks of our relationship, we went to Europe together right after her last day.

October:

we moved everything we own out of our shared apartment and into a storage unit, we started crashing with my parents while we looked for jobs.

November:

my girlfriend went to Los Angeles to visit her sister, broke up with me via gchat, and declined to take responsibility for a single possession she left here; Bru took home the trophy for the third consecutive year; and I made plans to move to Baltimore to live in a three bedroom house where I can have an office and I started to figure out what my life looks like now.

So here we are, rapidly approaching December and I think it’s fair to say that this moment will likely help define the next chapter of my life — and that makes me feel like I should make some resolutions or name some goals or set some intentions or something.

Here are, well, just a list of some things I feel like saying that mostly lacks parallel structure:

F.O.E. – friends over everything. This is partly me saying that I want to prioritize the people that have always had my back, but it also doubles as a gentle-ish way to say No New Friends.

No one’s mental health is more important than mine and I should not be with or around someone that asks me to sacrifice mine for hers on a regular basis.

Don’t take the blame if you didn’t earn the blame; take the fucking credit if you earned the fucking credit.

It’s fine for me to be a flannel & snapback bisexual and still identify as vaguely femme, it’s fine for me to represent my sexuality however the fuck I want, and it’s f i n e if I occasionally want to be reductive about my identity (and the identities of consenting friends) in service of a gay joke about my all-women football team.

I’m adopting Mindy Kaling’s “Why the fuck not me?” as my professional mantra. There’s not a single fucking reason I can’t have the freelance career of my dreams if I’m willing to earn it.